Recipe for Italian Fried Bread

Italian fried bread needs to be prepared in a very particular way for the best possible results and the maximum authenticity. Get a recipe for Italian fried bread with help from a cookbook author and executive chef in this free video clip.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I'm John Coletta. I'm the managing partner and executive chef of Quartino Restaurant here in Chicago, we're located on the corner of Ontario and State Street. Today, we're gonna make one of my favorite recipes, it's Italian fried bread. It sounds intriguing and complicated, but it's really not. The most important thing is to begin with four ingredients. We're going to have water, yeast, salt and flour. The important thing is to remember to have water that is 70 degrees. I've placed 600ml of water into the mixer at 70 degrees, I'm adding a gram of yeast. Now I like to mix this just for a brief moment, and now we're going to add a kilo of flour. And I like to use an Doppio zero flour, and we just get that in there. and we put this down, and now we'll begin to mix this. Okay. As it begins to mix, we're going to add salt at the end, and I like to use kosher salt. Now, I've used dry yeast. You can certainly feel free to use fresh yeast, but I think you're going to have varying results by using fresh yeast. Some could be a lot better than what's been produced, or we can certainly have some other. Now, we add a little bit of salt, okay? And this has gotta mix for five to seven minutes depending on the, the climate and the time of the year. So this mixes, and you can see how it's coming together. And here we are. It's a little after five minutes, so you can see the consistency of the dough. And that's the elasticity we're looking for. Now, we're going to take the dough and we'll stretch this out. I scaled this off to about 8 ounces, and here is the piece, and we get two nice pieces like this. Now to make the small ones, we'll cut this in very manageable, and see how easy this is? This is really, really simple. And then we'll just deep fry these. So we'll take these piece, and if you can have this, everything ready to go, you'll move this at 350 degrees, you'll end up with this wonderful deep fried Italian bread, which you can use for sandwiches, for hors d'oeuvres, or just for dipping in some wonderful tomato sauce, which I'm sure you wouldn't mind doing. And again, this is something that you should have a lot of fun with, and that you can get your children involved. My kids love making this stuff. And you can see that how simple and easy it is. If you've got some left over, don't be afraid to make some pizza also in the mean time. Again I'm John Coletta, I'm the executive chef and managing partner here at Quartino. I hope you enjoyed the wonderful videos that I've prepared for you, and I look forward to seeing you at Quartino.